Within a few years, the Web and the technologies that supercede the Web will allow us to deliver major portions of our courses to students at home or at work. Audio, video, realtime interaction between students, testing, polling... all these things will be possible soon. What can we do to get ready for this? We can begin to build into our courses some resource lists and exercises that take advantage of the millions of documents already available on the Web.
Ninety minutes is only enough time to provide an introduction and some examples, but I think you'll find that with even this small start you'll be able to teach yourself the rest. The document you're reading now will be available after the workshop is over by clicking on the Hotlist button on EdWeb.
In this session you'll begin to learn how to
- find information on the World Wide Web, and
- put it into forms useful to your students
Hotlists
A hotlist is a collection of pointers to resources on the World Wide Web. A hotlist for courses might be used as the equivalent of a set of assigned or suggested readings. Here are two examples of course hotlists created here:
WebQuests
A WebQuest is an inquiry-oriented activity in which learners are given a task and the resources to complete the task. Both the task description and some or all of the resources are documents on the web. The concept is described in a piece that appeared in The Distance Educator. Here are some example webquests:
A template for webquest creation is also available.
Finding Information on the Web.
To create either a hotlist or a WebQuest, you need to be able to locate resources relevant to your topic. With over 18 million documents out there already, this is no small task. Fortunately, various search engines are being developed that make it easier to find things than ever before. Here are some of the better ones:
If you want the most comprehensive search of both the Web and the thousands of newsgroups, use Alta Vista, a new search tool created by Digital Equipment. As an exercise, do a search for the term Truancy and see what comes up.
ERIC, of course, is a rich source of information to educators. There are several distinct categories of things to look for, and there's a whole page of ERIC search engines to explore.
To find short reviews of the education literature, search the database of ERIC Briefs.
You can also comb through ERIC's collection of lesson plans.
To search for anything in the ERIC database going back to 1989, you can use the search engine at Syracuse University, though it's still experimental and may sometimes give incomplete results.
If you know the general category of information that you want to search, but don't know the specific terms to look for, you can use the hierarchies of categories at Yahoo.
To find the e-mail address of an individual, you might try the 411 service.
If you know of a newsgroup that is likely to focus on the topic you're interested in, check the Green Eggs Report which collects any URL mentioned within any newsgroup.
To locate a mail list on a specific topic, check Liszt.
To find resources for teachers within a specific discipline, check Kathy Schrock's Guide for Educators, or Classroom Connect's list of educational links.
You might find materials you can adapt for use in your own classes by checking the World Lecture Hall collection of web pages created for use in university teaching.
Exercise
- Identify a topic that is a part of one of your courses. Think of words or phrases that are specific to that topic.
- Using the search tools listed above, see what you can find on the Web that is related to your topic. Write down the URL's that you find.
- Create the beginnings of a hotlist for your topic. You can use one of the hotlists cited here (EDTEC 670 or EDTEC 650) as a template. Using Netscape to view those documents, use the Save As command under the file menu and save a copy of the one of these files on your hard drive. Then launch HTML Web Weaver and open up the file. Wipe out the old data and replace it with your own.
With a bit of work, you could be the winner of the forthcoming College of Education Web contest!